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“Slingshot”

Rating:

Slingshot

First book of the new year and it wasn’t all that impressive! Sorry, but this is a story about some time travel adventures that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Oh, if you’re a “tree hugger”, environmentalist and one really way too concerned about the state of the Earth and it’s future, then you might find this book interesting. If you’re not one of those and believe that humanity should be able to enjoy all the fruits or our labor, then you might like the end of the story.

One thing that did stand out is the lack of editing. There are a lot of missing works and strange sentences in the text. There’s also several passages where the time-traveler should be saying they cannot talk about the future, instead the author left out “cannot” and makes it sound as though we’re going to hear something when we’re definitely not. Also, this takes place in Canada so I assume it’s written by a Canadian which is just fine, but they seem to have a little different ways of saying things than in my part of the USA. Just small things that I noticed, but with the distraction of poor editing, it only added to the disappointment of the book.

Joey Hawke is the main character in the story and he has plenty of scenes alone and with his future self. They seem to easily co-existed in the same time stream which might not be possible, but that’s a whole other story! It seems that Joey has been traveling back in time for quite some time because he can’t get what he needs to get done, done! And, it’s totally up to him to do what needs to be done although he does eventually get some help. One such person he “accidentally” runs into is a young lady by the name of Varni. Yeah, strange name, but it fits the authors needs. It’s kind of obvious who this young lady is although young Joey is totally clueless, but none of this would have worked if he’d been very smart. He’s an average guy going about his normal business until he meets his future self and then a huge starship lands outside his apartment complex.

This starship flashes the universal peace sign (didn’t know there was one) and eventually tells everyone on Earth they are there to ensure Earth doesn’t get wiped out by some massive astroid cluster heading for Earth right now. Problem is, no one on Earth can see anything like this massive astroid cluster anywhere near Earth. The Captain of the starship, who is definitely human, by the way, doesn’t give out much more information other than to tell the Earth humans that her ship will be building a number of huge cannons all over the world. These cannons are supposed to be used to destroy this astroid cluster. Now, this starship is supposed to be from five centuries in our future. Wouldn’t you hope they would have some better way of destroying something threatening in space besides building huge cannons. I mean, the cannons are built automatically by tiny machines so it would seem these same machines should have been used to slowly disassemble the asteroids.

Anyway that’s how the story goes. Back to Joey, well he’s supposed to be the hero of Earth. Only he has to destroy this huge starship before it can finish building these huge cannons. Oh, it also has a force field around it and laser turrets that can and do vaporize anything approaching the ship without the Captain’s permission.

Ok, so I read the book and didn’t really care for it much. It’s not a bad read, just not a thrilling as it could have been. We find out why this starship has come back to Earth, but it’s not the real story. No one attacks this starship or even tries to verify why we on Earth can’e see these astroid if they are within 24 hours of hitting Earth. Something certainly doesn’t seem right. In he end, maybe you might care, but I didn’t.

And lastly, I wonder what the title has to do with the book? The title certainly has nothing to do with the story, that’s for sure!



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